Resurrecting Henry “Box” Brown’s Moving Panorama, “Mirror of Slavery”
Test images generated with KerasCV’s implementation of stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion, an open-source text-prompted image generation model
VISIBLE uses mobile augmented reality (mobile AR), artificial intelligence (AI), motion-capture, and physical performance to resurrect and remediate the Victorian-era moving panorama, “Mirror of Slavery.” This project is in prototyping with the team I am leading in Washington U’s Humanities Digital Workshop.
A milestone in Black performance, “Mirror of Slavery” was created in 1850 by Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped enslavement by mailing himself to Philadelphia. The panorama depicted the evils of slavery, the escape of Brown and others, and a future with universal emancipation. With Brown as a charismatic narrator, the panorama was the cornerstone of his performance circuit across Europe as he built support for abolition. Like all panoramas, “Mirror of Slavery” was unwieldy and fragile. Today, Brown’s work exists only in descriptions, not as a physical object. VISIBLE uses mobile AR to recreate the moving panorama as a digital canvas users can launch in any location. To create the content depicted on the canvas, we are training an AI on these descriptions and samples of visual styles from the era.
In the next stage of VISIBLE, we will integrate the user’s geographic location, recent events, or other variables into this dataset, yielding different visuals each time the app is launched. We are also developing performance elements, such as a new script for the narrator role and dance components. We plan to motion-capture dancers to create a layer of digitally rendered shadows or “comet trails.” Turning this layer on or off in VISIBLE will put the digitally rendered elements in conversation with the user’s body, thereby evoking absent ancestral bodies moving with and through corporeal bodies in the present.